A network consists of two or more computers or other devices that are linked in order to share resources (such as databases, servers, printers, etc.), exchange files, or allow electronic communications. The computers on a network may be linked together through a communication medium, such as cables, telephone lines, radio waves, satellites, or infrared light beams. There are many types of computer networks, including local-area networks (LANs), wide-area networks (WANs), campus-area networks (CANs), metropolitan-area networks (MANs) and home-area networks (HANs). Networks are used to communicate between devices, such as via e-mail, and to provide access to resources stored on another device, such as a server.
Most organizations possess an Information Technology (IT) infrastructure comprising the computerized networks, intelligent terminals, and accompanying applications and services people use to access, create, disseminate, and utilize digital information. The IT infrastructure also includes the equipment, software, services, and products used in storing, processing, transmitting, and displaying all forms of information. Organizations are increasingly dependent on their IT infrastructure for all of their essential business processes, which often depend on software, hardware, networks and data systems working together with full integrity to provide business functionality to external and internal users alike. Increasingly, “online” business processes are both critical to a company's well-being and based on distributed IT infrastructures of mounting complexity. The scope of this infrastructure might even extend beyond the organization's boundaries into the infrastructures of partners and providers of managed services.
IT infrastructures are typically not the centralized, well-understood operations characteristic of the days of mainframes, architected and tested as a whole down to the last possible race condition or anomaly. Instead, IT professionals must manage an application infrastructure that is a complex maze of loosely interconnected racks of servers, network components, and a multi-tiered stack of logical components including application servers, database servers, load balancers and the applications themselves. Each business process depends on a chain of components drawn from that maze, yet the components are only managed as one of a number of similar components in a rack, “farm,” or other logical silo. The result is “affordable” computing power, but at the cost of difficult-to-manage (and thus costly) system behavior.
Network management is the process of managing the various network devices and network communication links in the IT infrastructure to provide the necessary network services to the users of the network. Typical network management systems collect information regarding the operation and performance of the network and analyze the collected information to detect problems in the network. Many companies have invested in tools that do a good job of helping technical experts monitor and manage each element or silo in the multi-tiered stack of physical and logical systems. But element monitoring falls short, because when something goes wrong in the dynamically interdependent overall system, there exists no manner of knowing which physical or logical component in which rack might be the cause. In fact, there typically is not a single cause, but rather some interaction of components that really creates the problem.
Element monitoring tools are currently used to attempt to identify problems occurring in the IT infrastructure. However, the element monitoring tools in wide use in enterprises today lack a holistic view and understanding of the interdependencies of the interconnected elements of the entire IT infrastructure.